Satellite communication systems transmit data to and receive data from users via radio-frequency communication links with movable (in a vehicle, airplane or ship, for example) or immovable ground stations. Such data can include voice, paging information, audio-visual information, facsimile data, and any other type of data or information.
Due to the orbital motion of the satellites in non-geostationary orbits including low-earth, medium-earth or combinations thereof, data communicated from one ground station to another ground station has to take different paths through the satellite constellation. This transfer or communication inherently produces an addressing and a routing problem. Existing conventional methods require that either the originating ground station know (or learn) about the movement of the satellite constellation with respect to the earth, or that each satellite in the satellite constellation translate the motion of the constellation into a variable routing path to reach a fixed-earth address associated with a ground station.
The first, existing conventional method of addressing and routing data or voice packets across a satellite constellation from one fixed ground station to another is to require the originating ground station to understand and tell the satellite constellation the proper route to take to get to the destination ground station. In order to do this, the originating ground station has to know which satellite is serving the destination ground station at all times. This usually requires a large amount of processing power in the originating ground station for calculating the exact location of all satellites in the constellation and for projecting the exact times that the destination ground station will be served by each satellite in the constellation. Moreover, a large amount of bandwidth is required to communicate that information to the originating ground station every time the path to the destination ground station changes (as it will in a non-geostationary system).
The second, existing conventional method of addressing and routing packets across a non-geostationary constellation is to require that each satellite in the constellation be able to track each destination ground station and translate that destination into address and routing information. This address and routing information changes as the non-geostationary constellation orbits the earth. This second conventional method requires a vast amount of processing power and storage in each of the satellite. Increased processing power and memory is directly proportional to increasing each satellite's weight and power requirements.
Accordingly, there is a substantial need to provide a system and method for creating an address and routing strategy that relieves the ground station of the burden of understanding the movement of the non-geostationary constellation and keeping extensive information about each of the destination ground stations.